Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, part 1: A legion of horribles

Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.

Rich is a big McCarthy head. For Benny and Cam, it's their first taste, and we're going straight to the top shelf: the 1985 epic historical novel Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West.

In this discussion we cover the first half of the book (chapters 1-12) as a meditation on violence, manifest destiny, self-mythology, and McCarthy's own cunning plot to positioning himself within the literary canon.

At the centre of it all there is the judge: a towering, hairless enigma who might be a false god, or a devil... or something even worse.

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) quick background
• (00:06:07) introducing the Kid and the judge
• 00:12:46) why did Captain White’s expedition fail so badly?
• (00:24:54) Comanche war party run-on sentence fever dream
• (00:34:12) Sometime come the mother, sometime come the wolf
• (00:42:00) the strangely egalitarian Glanton Gang
• (00:56:13) Judge Holden piss-infused gunpowder volcano massacre
• (01:15:19) Decoding the story of the harness-maker and the traveller
• (01:28:01) Goodhart’s law in scalp-hunting bounties
• (01:34:48) First impressions of McCarthy
• (01:37:32) Listener mail: Knausgaard and autofiction rant revisited

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NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)